A further vision is vouchsafed to us by Providence. Mr. Chrysostom Lorton and the sources of his wealth. The debt owed to me by Mr. Septimus Lorton. Interview with Mr. and Mrs. Septimus Lorton. Mr. Septimus Lorton’s disgraceful attitude. My father is compelled to be frank with him. What I discovered in Greenwich Park.
Manifestly as it had been Providence that had thus revealed to us the general sphere of my future activities, it was no less clearly the same beneficent Agency that determined their actual channel; and it has always seemed to me peculiarly appropriate that the particular enterprise with which I was to be first connected should have been suggested to my father during the process of family prayers.
This took place, according to our usual custom, immediately after the conclusion of our evening meal and consisted of the singing by my father and myself of two or three hymns or sacred choruses, followed by the reading on the part of my father of a chapter of Holy Scripture, the whole being concluded by one of those extemporary prayers in the composition of which my father was so skilled. For the purposes of the Scripture reading the volume generally used was a large Bible inherited by my father, but on the evening in question, owing to an accident with some stewed fruit, this was absent at a neighbouring bookbinder’s. My father had therefore borrowed with my glad permission my copy of the Lorton Bible for Schools, and it was in opening this that he caught sight of the words “eighteenth edition” on the first page.
That something had perturbed him was instantly apparent both to my mother and myself, not only on account of the sudden tremor that became visible in his left hand but of the extraordinary rapidity with which he read the appointed chapter, and the verbal errors that consequently ensued. His subsequent prayer too was so brief that we were scarcely upon our knees before he had leapt to his feet again, and my mother and myself, indeed, were still kneeling when he began to expound the idea that had been vouchsafed to him.
“I have it,” he cried. “It’s just been sent to me. Chrysostom Lorton. That’s the man. Eighteen editions—that’s what his Bible’s gone into, and none of the authors with any royalty rights!”
Nor was that all, for in addition, as I have said, to being the elder brother of Mr. Septimus Lorton, he was not only the proprietor of the well-known Beulah, perhaps the most popular of weekly religious journals, but his Peeping Up Series for Children, devotional stories with coloured illustrations, were familiar objects upon the nursery book-shelves of every evangelical household. Moreover he was the medium through which were issued to the world many millions of hortatory pamphlets, while the counters of his show-room in Paternoster Row were heaped with every kind of Protestant literature.
Such then was the man and such the undertaking, not only Xtian but lucrative, that by a chance gesture, or so it might have seemed, now stood beckoning before us; and it was only necessary, as my father justly said, for his brother Septimus to do the rest. But would he? I was at first doubtful. A weak man, he was also inert. And it did not of course follow that because he used his brother’s Bible he was on intimate or influential terms with him. This much was clear, however, that as the oldest pupil in his school, and in view of the treatment that I had received from his subordinates, he was under an obligation to me that neither my father nor myself could morally allow ourselves to remit. And although for reasons that I have already mentioned I had not advanced from my original class, in the strictly ethical sense, by his own admission, I was facile princeps.[[4]]
[4]. Easily first.
“A good boy,” said Mr. Lorton, “a very, very good boy, or shall we say, now that he has begun to shave, an extremely admirable young man.”
This was upon the next evening, the penultimate evening of my last term at school, when both my father and myself were sitting in Mr. Lorton’s study for the purpose indicated above.